Installing and Configuring ProFTPD Server in Ubuntu/Debian

FTP servers are the piece of software that allows you to create a FTP connection between your local computer and a web server. ProFTPD is a FTP server for Unix/Linux servers, very configurable and very effective, it is free & open-sourced, released under the GPL license.

Install Proftpd in Ubuntu and Debian

In this article, we’ll explain how to install ProFTPD server on Ubuntu/Debian machines.

Step 1: Install ProFTPD Server

Of course, you need to install the software in order to use it. First make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running these following apt-get commands in the terminal.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade

Now to install ProFTPD server, run in the terminal.

$ sudo apt-get install proftpd

While installing, it will ask you to choose the usage type you want for your ProFTPD server, you may choose the best mode that fits your needs.

Install Proftpd Server

Step 2: Configure ProFTPD Server

Before start using it, we’ll need to edit some files, the /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf is the default configuration file for Ubuntu/Debian servers, to start editing it using the vi command, run.

$ sudo vi /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf

Configure Proftpd Server

Press the “I” key to start editing the file. Now change the content of the file as shown it below.

ServerName: Make it your default server name.

UseIPV6: You may switch it to “Off“, if you don’t use it.

DefaultRoot : Uncomment this line to restrict users with their home folders.

RequireValidShell: Uncomment this line and make it “On” to enable logging in for users, even for those who doesn’t have a valid shell in /etc/shells to log in.

AuthOrder: Uncomment the line to enable the using of local passwords.

Port: This line defines the default port for the FTP server, it is 21 by default. If you want, you can define any custom port here.

SystemLog: The default log file path, you may change it if you want.

After making above changes as suggested, you can save the file, press the “ESC” key and write :x to save and quite .

Now restart the ProFTPD server using this command.

$ sudo service proftpd restart

During ProFTPD installation, a default “proftpd” user created automatically, but we’ll need to create a password for it, to do so, run.

$ sudo passwd proftpd

That’s it!. You can now go to following addresses on the browser, it will be up and running, it will ask you about the user name and the password.

ftp://youripaddress
OR
ftp://yourdomian.com

Login to Proftpd

In the User Name filed write “proftpd” and in the Password filed write the password that you set before for the proftpd user.

Proftpd Directory Listing

Step 3: Creating ProFTPD Users

As you noticed, you are in the default home directory for the “proftpd” user, which isn’t useful for us, thats why we are going to create a new user with the /var/www/ folder as the home folder, so we can access it easily.

To create a FTP user say “myproftpduser” run.

$ sudo useradd myproftpduser

To create a password for it.

$ sudo passwd myproftpduser

To change it’s home folder to /var/www/ run.

$ sudo usermod -m -d /var/www/ myproftpduser

You can also define user home directory with useradd command, while creating a new users in Linux, for more information and usage of useradd command, read our article at.

And now you can access it from the FTP server easily, you may also use Filezilla or any other FTP client to access your FTP server as well if you want.

Step 4: Troubleshooting ProFTPD:

Any available error messages will be stored in /var/log/proftpd/proftpd.log by default, you may check this file if your ProFTPD server installation isn’t working, you must also note that sometimes it happens that the ProFTPD server lags and you can’t access the server due to the “Connection Refused” message, it is not a problem, all what you have to do is to keep restarting the ProFTPD server until it works (in case if there were no other errors).

Have you installed the ProFTPD server before? What do you think about it when comparing it to other FTP servers like wu-ftpd ?